ABSTRACT
The building up of experiences into a complex structure, implies a fundamental experience on which the structure may rest. The great mass of our sensations, and of the perceptions we form out of them, being merely signs, there must be something which they are signs of; and this something, whatever be its special modifications, must have an essential element. By successive decompositions of our knowledge into simpler and simpler components, we must come at last to the simplest—to the ultimate material—to the substratum. It is the impression of resistance. This is the primordial, the universal, the ever-present constituent of consciousness. Thus, impressions of resistance, as being the earliest that are appreciated by the sensitive creation regarded as a progressive whole, and by every higher creature in the course of its evolutions; and as being appreciated by almost all parts of the body in the great majority of creatures; are necessarily the first materials put together in the genesis of intelligence.
